Young Man in a Fur Cap

Carel Fabritius made this in 1654, and it is almost certainly himself. He looks straight out from under a fur cap, a soldier's breastplate at his shoulder, the pose borrowed from the self-portraits of his old master Rembrandt, whose studio he had left about a decade before. Fabritius had settled in Delft and was reckoned the most gifted of Rembrandt's pupils, loosening the manner into something lighter and cooler. On the 12th of October that same year a city gunpowder magazine blew up and flattened a quarter of Delft, his studio among it. He was pulled from the wreckage alive but died of his injuries at 32. Only a handful of his paintings survive.